


bring the rain to my front door

by Ronabird



Series: from the belly of the deepest love [2]
Category: RWBY
Genre: AU-typical overtones of violation, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Touching, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, One-Shot, bodysharing problems
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26443903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ronabird/pseuds/Ronabird
Summary: Oscar, says the voice in his head, still in that tone of tired warning.I really must advise against contact with your daemon, at this stage.
Relationships: Ozpin & Oscar Pine
Series: from the belly of the deepest love [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1922233
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	bring the rain to my front door

The voice isn't real.

"Definitely not real," Zoroaster agrees, pacing the worn floorboards of their bedroom. It takes twenty-two steps of his little antelope legs, clicking his way back and forth in front of their bookcase. The footsteps are light enough no one from downstairs should come to check up on them; that's the main reason _Oscar_ isn't pacing, is sitting still and tense with his arms around his legs. He does _not_ want anyone to come check up on them. He does not want anyone to know he is apparently having a breakdown.

 _Oscar, please_ , says the voice that he is definitely imagining. _While I do understand the assumption, I can assure you this isn't any sort of breakdown._

"Shut up," says Oscar, into his knees. It comes out muffled. He can _feel_ the pang of sympathy from the voice, that's the worst thing. "Stop _talking_. You're not real."

"It's just stress," says Zoroaster, his big ears twitching. "We're stressed."

"We have nothing to be stressed about," Oscar observes to his knees.

"Except that we _hear voices_ , _apparently,_ " says Zoroaster, tone pitching just a little closer to hysterical.

_If you'd allow me to introduce myself—_

"Ozpin!" says Oscar, and now _he's_ the one going too loud and desperate. He hurriedly tries to clamp down on the building need to yell. Oscar is generally very good at not yelling, but the voice-that-isn't-real is wearing him thin. "I _know._ You've told me you're some kind of ghost—"

_A soul, actually—_

"But that can't _happen—_ "

_Think of it like having a second daemon._

Oscar goes still, at that. Zoroaster turns to meet his gaze. They are both thinking the same panicked thing, both recalling the moment they are not speaking about. The reason Zoroaster is pacing on the other side of the room from Oscar, who stays curled in on himself at the foot of the bed, when all they want is to cling to each other until things make sense again.

"It's not like having a second daemon," says Oscar, stiffly, and he raises his head. He doesn't have anywhere in particular to glare at such that it would be directed at the voice in his head, but he makes a best effort, staring an accusatory hole into the bookshelf. "If you were my daemon—"

"If you were my _person_ ," Zoroaster adds—

"—i-it wouldn't feel this _bad._ "

The voice is silent a moment. Oscar, feeling properly defiant now, uncurls from himself to sit up straight. He holds out a hand to Zoroaster, who hesitates.

"Try it again," says Oscar to his daemon. "Come on."

Still Zoroaster hesitates, balking, holding still. He looks back at his boy with open fear in his eyes, and Oscar knows it must be reflected in his own face, but he's determined now.

"Come on," he says again.

 _Oscar,_ warns the voice in his head, sounding so terribly sad and pitying that Oscar itches to rip it out and throw it _away_ , itches to get that cloying sympathy _away_ from himself and his little antelope-shaped soul. _I'm afraid the result will still—_

"I'm not listening to you," Oscar declares, a little louder than he means to. And, "Come on, Zoro."

"Alright," mumbles the little daemon, and he takes a few neat and nervous steps over to his boy. He has wide dark eyes, and pretty little horns no longer than his ears. He's exactly the right size for a fourteen-year-old boy to scoop into his arms and cuddle like a small dog, and that is exactly what Oscar plans to do.

If it weren't for the complication. But. But they can ignore it, this time. It isn't _real._

 _Oscar,_ says the voice in his head, still in that tone of tired warning. _I really must advise against contact with your daemon, at this stage._

Oscar ignores him. Zoroaster steps close enough that his soft nose is an inch from Oscar's outstretched fingers, and he hesitates there. They both hold still like that, breathless with tension together.

 _It will only be unpleasant,_ murmurs the voice in Oscar's head. _For all involved._

That makes Oscar's teeth grit, and he reaches forward. The pads of his fingertips land on Zoroaster's delicately furred head, and the boy and antelope shudder together in shock and revulsion: an electric current current sings between them, discordant and intimate and _horrible_ , as though a stranger has opened him up and is stroking his raw nerves. Touching his own daemon shouldn't feel like this. Touching his own daemon should feel like touching an intimate part of himself: safe and close and comforting, the sense of being fully in contact with himself. The sense of being _whole_.

Instead, it doesn't feel like he's touching _himself_ at all. The short fur of Zoro's forehead feels alien beneath his fingertips. His fingers on Zoro's fur feels _wrong_ , as though a stranger is putting his hands there.

 _I'd really rather,_ says Ozpin, sounding distinctly choked now, _you refrained from doing that._

Oscar takes a shuddering breath and recoils from his own daemon, breaking the contact. He scoots back against his bed again, trying to ground himself in the hard press of wood against his shoulderblades. He tucks his face back into his crossed arms and tries not to feel like he's hiding.

 _I'm so sorry_ , murmurs Ozpin in his head. _Really, I am. It will get better._

"Yeah?" asks Oscar of his knees, and he can't keep the thin little wobble from his voice. It betrays the tears in his eyes and the lump in his throat, and he buried his face only more insistently into his arms. Several paces away, separated by such a stupid little empty stretch of bedroom, Zoroaster starts pacing again. Click-click-click go his little hooved feet. "Are you going to go _away_ and leave me alone with my own soul again?"

There is a telling pause. Oscar makes a derisive, miserable little noise at it. "I didn't think so."

*

Oscar does not touch his daemon again in that farmhouse. Not until the night they pack their bag and creep down the stairs, breathing tight and shaky and hating, hating, _hating_ that every step further out into the unknown feels so _right_.

They can't stand it. Oscar wants the comfort so badly, and Zoroaster is just as desperate. The little duiker tucks himself against Oscar's ankle, and the live-wire feeling of connection isn't so bad when it's muffled by his pants. It's not the brutally intimate _wrongness_ of a barehanded touch, even if it's close. It still makes his skin crawl and Zoro's fur prickle horribly.

In his head, Ozpin takes on the same flat, conspicuous silence he does when Oscar goes to the bathroom or gets undressed or does anything else he doesn't want anyone to see. Oscar likes to pretend it's the professor shutting his eyes and plugging his ears, even if they both know it's probably a lie. ( _Can you quit watching me?_ he'd demanded, on the first day, and _I can certainly try,_ Ozpin had murmured back. That was the best he'd been given.)

So Oscar stretches his luck, and reaches down to scoop his daemon into his arms, feeling the warmth of the little body through his shirt and his gloves. They shudder together at the raw-nerve feeling of the touch, but the warmth and hammering little heartbeat of the antelope is so perfectly _his_ that it's worth it. Zoro tucks his slender little face into the crook of Oscar's neck, and the wrongness is just dulled enough by the bandages to be tolerable.

"It'll be okay," Oscar tells his soul. "We'll be okay. We're still us."

Just like Ozpin's silence, they pretend to believe it.

*

"Do you think he's really gone?" asks Oscar, in the cold and quiet of their stolen room. The farmhouse reminds him of home, even if it never snowed like this back home. He's never _seen_ snow like this, thick and dark and blanketing— except that he feels like he has. One more thing that _shouldn't_ be familiar, but _is._

Even with Ozpin gone remote and silent in his head, the snow still feels familiar. The man's presence feels tucked away somewhere deep and distant, as though there's a great empty space between their minds and Oscar's reach can't extend that far. It's not the flat-silence of Ozpin biting his tongue while Oscar did something he didn't want to witness. It's... something more than that.

"We could find out," says Zoroaster, and Oscar jolts with the realization.

"Yeah," he says, at once, and hooks his legs over the side of the bed. His daemon walks the short distance over to him, and his little hooves go click-click-click on the wooden floor. Oscar finds himself unaccountably nervous, breathless with it, as he leans down and holds out a hand to his daemon. Palm out, fingers trembling slightly. He's already pulled off his gloves.

Zoroaster touches his nose to those bare fingertips, and they both flinch.

It's... not as bad as it had been. It's not as bad as that first night, the impossible feeling of a total stranger touching his very soul. But still the electric thrum of connection is there, discordant and inexplicably _wrong_. It feels like someone petting Zoroaster's fur backwards and running fingertips across Oscar's exposed heart, all at once. It feels like something being _done_ to them, not something they're _doing._

"Well," says Oscar, tightly, as he drops his hand. His daemon looks back at him with soft, dark eyes, and says nothing. "Guess he's still here."

They curl up on the cold bed, a foot apart, and try to sleep.

*

And in the end, Ozpin is right. It gets better. And worse.

James— General Ironwood— keeps calling them to meetings, sweeping them into top-secret talks, making them walk fast to keep up with his steady stride. His daemon is a martial eagle, massive and stern, who looks as though she could pluck Zoroaster from the ground without effort. They should be terrified of her. (It is more jarring that they aren't. She feels like an old friend.)

They walk with the General, and sometimes forget that they don't need the cane. The rhythm of walking with it feels _right_ , as bone-deep and familiar as the texture of his own daemon's fur. Oscar has started to wonder if even _that's_ really his; Ozpin's daemon had been a type of antelope, too. In the life before that, he'd had an elk. And then a deer. And then—

But it's better not to think about those things. It's just better not to. Once he gets started, there's no way to pry himself free except for Zoroaster to come lick his fingers and let the live-nerve _wrongness_ of it bring him back to himself.

Until they try that, one night in their neatly-made-up Atlas bedroom. Oscar sits on the floor, his back to the bed, trying to breathe through everything that has been happening to him lately. Trying to be okay with it. Trying to be _okay._

"You've still got me," says Zoroaster, which is the little comfort they can give themselves and never enough. Oscar doesn't even have that, really; he can't even touch his own daemon without someone else in the way. He scrubs at his face with his hands and doesn't look at the little antelope, and Zoroaster trots closer. "Hey, come one."

"I just," mutters Oscar, "miss when it was simple."

 _I miss when I could hold you_ , he doesn't say. They both know what he means anyway.

"It'll be okay," says Zoro, and he steps closer still. Oscar has pulled off the gloves for the night, and his daemon steps up to nose at one bare hand with his delicate little antelope's face. His nose is soft and the contact makes them shiver with the live-wire intensity of connection, but they don't pull away.

Oscar realizes, a beat late: they don't _need_ to pull away.

"Uh," he starts, and Zoroaster goes "Oh," and they break apart to stare at each other. For a moment they're stuck like that, breathless and terrified.

Then, "Do it again," insists Zoroaster, in his little voice, and he steps a pace further forward. Oscar nods and closes his fingers around one little horn.

The sensation is intense. It feels _strange_ but not _wrong_ : it makes them shudder, makes them breathless, but it doesn't feel like some stranger is touching the most intimate part of them. It doesn't feel like touching his own daemon he's known all his life, either. It's... something in-between.

Ozpin is still distant, still locked away. Oscar can almost feel him, when he does this. With his hands on his daemon, it's like shining a light on all the places that aren't _him_ : those are the places that light up with _nononowrong_. He grips one of Zoroaster's little horns hard enough for the point to dig into his palm, and he can _feel_ Ozpin's distant murmur of distress. For just a moment, he can even tell it's distinct from his own.

"Ozpin," he says, to the empty room and the little daemon under his hands. "Can you hear me?"

Nothing. Just the low buzz of _wrong_ and _intense_ as he touches his daemon, which must come from the other man. Right? The lines blur so easily, lately, but this part must be straightforward. He really hopes.

"Fine," he says, at the silence. He leans down to scoop Zoroaster into his arms, and the duiker tucks his little body close; they both shudder but don't stop. "Stay gone for tonight, then. I'm doing this."

"It's just us," says Zoroaster, in a tone like he's trying to convince the both of them.

Oscar shivers and holds him and wishes he could believe it. "Yeah."


End file.
